TORTURE AND TRUTH
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
By Mark Danner.
New York Review. 580 pp. Paperback, $19.95

In scandals, chronology can be everything.
The facts you find out first, the images that are initially imprinted
on your consciousness, the details that then follow: these make the difference
between a culture-changing tipping point and a weatherable media flurry.
With the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photographs, which have become
iconic, created the context and the meaning of what took place. We think
we know the contours of that story: a few soldiers on the night shift
violated established military rules and subjected prisoners to humiliating
abuse and terror. Chaos in the line of command, an overstretched military,
a bewildering insurgency: all contributed to incidents that were alien
to the values of the United States and its military. The scandal was an
aberration. It was appalling. Responsibility was taken. Reports were issued.
Hearings continue.

But the photographs lied. They told us a shard of the truth. In retrospect,
they deflected us away from what was really going on, and what is still
going on. The problem is not a co-ordinated cover-up. Nor is it a lack
of information. The official government and Red Cross reports on prisoner
torture and abuse, compiled in two separate volumes, ''The Abu Ghraib
Investigations,'' by a former Newsweek editor, Steven Strasser, and ''Torture
and Truth,'' by a New York Review of Books contributor, Mark
Danner, are almost numbingly exhaustive in their cataloging of specific
mistakes, incidents and responsibilities. Danner's document-dump runs
to almost 600 pages of print, the bulk of it in small type. The American
Civil Liberties Union has also successfully engineered the release of
what may eventually amount to hundreds of thousands of internal government
documents detailing the events.

<>

Torture
and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
Mark Danner, New York Review Books: 580 pp., $19.95 paper

That tells you something important at the start. Whatever happened was
exposed in a free society; the military itself began the first inquiries.
You can now read, in these pages, previously secret memorandums from sources
as high as the attorney general all the way down to prisoner testimony
to the International Committee of the Red Cross. I confess to finding
this transparency both comforting and chilling, like the photographs that
kick-started the public's awareness of the affair. Comforting because
only a country that is still free would allow such airing of blood-soaked
laundry. Chilling because the crimes committed strike so deeply at the
core of what a free country is supposed to mean. The scandal of Abu Ghraib
is therefore a sign of both freedom's endurance in America and also, in
certain dark corners, its demise.

The documents themselves tell the story. In this, Danner's book is by
far the better of the two. He begins with passionate essays that originally
appeared in The New York Review of Books, but very soon leaves
the stage and lets the documents speak for themselves. His book contains
the two reports Strasser publishes, but many more as well. If you read
it in the order Danner provides, you can see exactly how this horror came
about - and why it's still going on. As Danner observes, this is a scandal
with almost everything in plain sight.

The critical enabling decision was the president's insistence that prisoners
in the war on terror be deemed ''unlawful combatants'' rather than prisoners
of war. The arguments are theoretically sound ones - members of Al Qaeda
and the Taliban are not party to the Geneva Convention and their own conduct
violates many of its basic demands. But even at the beginning, President
Bush clearly feared the consequences of so broad an exemption for cruel
and inhumane treatment. So he also insisted that although prisoners were
not legally eligible for humane treatment, they should be granted it anyway.
The message sent was: these prisoners are beneath decent treatment, but
we should still provide it. That's a strangely nuanced signal to be giving
the military during wartime.

You can see the same strange ambivalence in Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's decision to approve expanded interrogation techniques in December
2002 for Guantánamo inmates - and then to revoke the order six
weeks later. The documents show that the president was clearly warned
of the dangers of the policy he decided upon - Colin Powell's January
2002 memo is almost heart-breakingly prescient and sane in this regard
- but he pressed on anyway. Rumsfeld's own revocation of the order suggests
his own moral qualms about what he had unleashed.

But Bush clearly leaned toward toughness. Here's the precise formulation
he used: ''As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall
continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate
and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent
with the principles of Geneva.'' (My italics.)

Notice the qualifications. The president wants to stay not within the
letter of the law, but within its broad principles, and in the last resort,
''military necessity'' can overrule all of it. According to his legal
counsel at the time, Alberto R. Gonzales, the president's warmaking powers
gave him ultimate constitutional authority to ignore any relevant laws
in the conduct of the conflict. Sticking to the Geneva Convention was
the exclusive prerogative of one man, George W. Bush; and he could, if
he wished, make exceptions. As Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee
argues in another memo: ''Any effort to apply Section 2340A in a manner
that interferes with the president's direction of such core war matters
as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants thus would be unconstitutional.''
(Section 2340A refers to the United States law that incorporates the international
Convention Against Torture.)

Agence France-Presse, Via Getty Images

A naked prisoner appears to cower before an unmuzzled dog
in a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in late
2003 and leaked to The Washington Post a few months later.

The president's underlings got the mixed message. Bybee analyzed the
relevant statutes against torture to see exactly how far the military
could go in mistreating prisoners without blatant illegality. His answer
was surprisingly expansive. He argued that all the applicable statutes
and treaty obligations can be read in such a way as to define torture
very narrowly. Bybee asserted that the president was within his legal
rights to permit his military surrogates to inflict ''cruel, inhuman or
degrading'' treatment on prisoners without violating strictures against
torture. For an act of abuse to be considered torture, the abuser must
be inflicting pain ''of such a high level of intensity that the pain is
difficult for the subject to endure.'' If the abuser is doing this to
get information and not merely for sadistic enjoyment, then ''even if
the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions,'' he's
not guilty of torture. Threatening to kill a prisoner is not torture;
''the threat must indicate that death is 'imminent.' '' Beating prisoners
is not torture either. Bybee argues that a case of kicking an inmate in
the stomach with military boots while the prisoner is in a kneeling position
does not by itself rise to the level of torture.

Bybee even suggests that full-fledged torture of inmates might be legal
because it could be construed as ''self-defense,'' on the grounds that
''the threat of an impending terrorist attack threatens the lives of hundreds
if not thousands of American citizens.'' By that reasoning, torture could
be justified almost anywhere on the battlefield of the war on terror.
Only the president's discretion forbade it. These guidelines were formally
repudiated by the administration the week before Gonzales's appearance
before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as attorney general.

A man detained at Abu Gharib chained
to a bed with a woman's underpants on his head.

In this context, Rumsfeld's decision to take the gloves off in Guantánamo
for six weeks makes more sense. The use of dogs to intimidate prisoners
and the use of nudity for humiliation were now allowed. Although abuse
was specifically employed in only two cases before Rumsfeld rescinded
the order, practical precedents had been set; and the broader mixed message
sent from the White House clearly reached commanders in the field. Lt.
Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, in charge of the Iraq counterinsurgency, also
sent out several conflicting memos with regard to the treatment of prisoners
- memos that only added to the confusion as to what was permitted and
what wasn't. When the general in charge of Guantánamo was sent
to Abu Ghraib to help intelligence gathering, the ''migration'' of techniques
(the term used in the Pentagon's Schlesinger Report) from those reserved
for extreme cases in the leadership of Al Qaeda to thousands of Iraqi
civilians, most of whom, according to intelligence sources, were innocent
of any crime at all, was complete. Again, there is no evidence of anyone
at a high level directly mandating torture or abuse, except in two cases
in Gitmo. But there is growing evidence recently uncovered by the A.C.L.U.
- not provided in Danner's compilation - that authorities in the F.B.I.
and elsewhere were aware of abuses and did little to prevent or stop them.
Then there were the vast loopholes placed in the White House torture memos,
the precedents at Guantánamo, the winks and nods from Washington
and the pressure of an Iraqi insurgency that few knew how to restrain.
It was a combustible mix.

What's notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their
common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any
reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one
prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay
to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know,
in any number of hidden jails affecting ''ghost detainees'' kept from
the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the Marines, the
Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special Forces and
on and on. The use of hooding was ubiquitous; the same goes for forced
nudity, sexual humiliation and brutal beatings; there are examples of
rape and electric shocks. Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored
to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public
is a deep cultural artifact.

Whether random bad apples had picked up these techniques from hearsay
or whether these practices represented methods authorized by commanders
grappling with ambiguous directions from Washington is hard to pin down
from the official reports. But it is surely significant that very few
abuses occurred in what the Red Cross calls ''regular internment facilities.''
Almost all took place within prisons designed to collect intelligence,
including, of course, Saddam Hussein's previous torture palace at Abu
Ghraib and even the former Baathist secret police office in Basra. (Who
authorized the use of these particular places for a war of liberation
is another mystery.) This tells us two things: that the vast majority
of soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere had nothing to do with these incidents;
and that the violence had a purpose. The report of the International Committee
of the Red Cross says: ''Several military intelligence officers confirmed
to the I.C.R.C. that it was part of the military intelligence process
to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and
empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment,
including physical and psychological coercion.''

An e-mail message recovered by Danner from a captain in military intelligence
in August 2003 reveals the officer's desire to distinguish between genuine
prisoners of war and ''unlawful combatants.'' The president, of course,
had endorsed that distinction in theory, although not in practice - even
in Guantánamo, let alone Iraq. Somehow Bush's nuances never made
it down the chain to this captain. In the message, he asked for advice
from other intelligence officers on which illegal techniques work best:
a ''wish list'' for interrogators. Then he wrote: ''The gloves are coming
off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear
that we want these individuals broken.''

How do you break these people? According to the I.C.R.C., one prisoner
''alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened
to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back
and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a
scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would
allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain
to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination
revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the
right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.''

A hooded detainee at Abu Ghraib, apparently
chained to a door and balancing on two boxes.

Even Bybee's very narrow definition of torture would apply in this case.
Here's another - not from Abu Ghraib:

A detainee ''had been hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie
face down, on a hot surface during transportation. This had caused severe
skin burns that required three months' hospitalization. . . . He had to
undergo several skin grafts, the amputation of his right index finger,
and suffered . . . extensive burns over the abdomen, anterior aspects
of the outer extremities, the palm of his right hand and the sole of his
left foot.''And another, in a detainee's own words: ''They threw pepper
on my face and the beating started. This went on for a half hour. And
then he started beating me with the chair until the chair was broken.
After that they started choking me. At that time I thought I was going
to die, but it's a miracle I lived. And then they started beating me again.
They concentrated on beating me in my heart until they got tired from
beating me. They took a little break and then they started kicking me
very hard with their feet until I passed out.''

An incident uncovered by the A.C.L.U. and others was described in The
Washington Post on Dec. 22. A young soldier with no training in interrogation
techniques ''acknowledged forcing two men to their knees, placing bullets
in their mouths, ordering them to close their eyes, and telling them they
would be shot unless they answered questions about a grenade incident.
He then took the bullets, and a colleague pretended to load them in the
chamber of his M-16 rifle.''

These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are incidents
reported within the confines of the United States government. The Schlesinger
panel has officially conceded, although the president has never publicly
acknowledged, that American soldiers have tortured five inmates to death.
Twenty-three other deaths that occurred during American custody had not
been fully investigated by the time the panel issued its report in August.
Some of the techniques were simply brutal, like persistent vicious beatings
to unconsciousness. Others were more inventive. In April 2004, according
to internal Defense Department documents recently procured by the A.C.L.U.,
three marines in Mahmudiya used an electric transformer, forcing a detainee
to ''dance'' as the electricity coursed through him. We also now know
that in Guantánamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears
of detainees.

Here's another case from the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib, led
by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Maj. Gen. George R. Fay:

''On another occasion DETAINEE-07 was forced to lie down while M.P.'s
jumped onto his back and legs. He was beaten with a broom and a chemical
light was broken and poured over his body. . . . During this abuse a police
stick was used to sodomize DETAINEE-07 and two female M.P.'s were hitting
him, throwing a ball at his penis, and taking photographs.''

Courtesy of The New Yorker

An
Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

Last December, documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. also cited an F.B.I.
agent at Guantánamo Bay who observed that ''on a couple of occasions,
I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in
a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times
they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there
for 18 to 24 hours or more.'' In one case, he added, ''the detainee was
almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had
apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.''

This kind of scene can also be found at Abu Ghraib: ''An 18 November
2003 photograph depicts a detainee dressed in a shirt or blanket lying
on the floor with a banana inserted into his anus. This as well as several
others show the same detainee covered in feces, with his hands encased
in sandbags, or tied in foam and between two stretchers.'' This, apparently,
was a result of self-inflicted mania, although where the mentally ill
man procured a banana is not elaborated upon.

Also notable in Abu Ghraib was the despicable use of religion to humiliate.
One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced
down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted
in broken English:

''They stripped me naked, they asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said,
'Yes.' They said 'F - - - you' and 'F - - - him.' '' Later, this inmate
recounts: ''Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said
to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and
I will torture you.' ''

Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment ''abuse'' or some other
euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American
soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed
it was sanctioned from above. According to The Washington Post, one sergeant
who witnessed the torture thought Military Intelligence approved of all
of it: ''The M.I. staffs, to my understanding, have been giving Graner''
- one of the chief torturers at Abu Ghraib - ''compliments on the way
he has been handling the M.I. holds [prisoners held by military intelligence].
Example being statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast';
'They answer every question'; 'They're giving out good information, finally';
and 'Keep up the good work' - stuff like that.'' At Guantánamo
Bay, newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt they
were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington.

Was the torture effective? The only evidence in the documents Danner
has compiled that it was even the slightest bit helpful comes from the
Schlesinger report. It says ''much of the information in the recently
released 9/11 Commission's report, on the planning and execution of the
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came from interrogation
of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere.'' But the context makes
plain that this was intelligence procured without torture. It also claims
that good intelligence was received from the two sanctioned cases of expanded
interrogation techniques at Guantánamo. But everything else points
to the futility of the kind of brutal techniques used in Iraq and elsewhere.

Worse, there's plenty of evidence that this kind of treatment makes
gathering intelligence harder. In Abu Ghraib, according to the official
documents, up to 90 percent of the inmates were victims of random and
crude nighttime sweeps. If these thousands of Iraqis did not sympathize
with the insurgency before they came into American custody, they had good
reason to thereafter. Stories of torture, of sexual humiliation, of religious
mockery have become widespread in Iraq, and have been amplified by the
enemy. If the best intelligence comes from persuading the indigenous population
to give up information on insurgents, then the atrocities perpetrated
by a tiny minority of American troops actually help the insurgency, rather
than curtail it.

Who was responsible? There are various levels of accountability. But
it seems unmistakable from these documents that decisions made by the
president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion,
vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture.
The president bears sole responsibility for ignoring Colin Powell's noble
warnings. The esoteric differences between legal ''abuse'' and illegal
''torture'' and the distinction between ''prisoners of war'' and ''unlawful
combatants'' were and are so vague as to make the abuse of innocents almost
inevitable. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority of the
Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that ''the government has never provided
any court with the full criteria that it uses in classifying individuals''
as enemy combatants. It is one thing to make a distinction in theory between
Geneva-protected combatants and unprotected Qaeda operatives. But in the
chaos of a situation like Iraq, how can you practically know the difference?
When one group is designated as unworthy of humane treatment, and that
group is impossible to distinguish from others, it is unsurprising that
exceptions quickly become rules. The best you can say is that in an administration
with a reputation for clear lines of command and clear rules of engagement,
the vagueness and incompetence are the most striking features.

Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity
of what has taken place. His first instinct was to minimize the issue;
later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences claiming that
the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants, rather than a consequence
of his own decisions. But the impact of these events on domestic morale,
on the morale of the vast majority of honorable soldiers in a very tough
place and on the reputation of the United States in the Middle East is
incalculable. The war on terror is both military and political. The president's
great contribution has been to recognize that a solution is impossible
without political reform in the Middle East. And yet the prevalence of
brutality and inhumanity among American interrogators has robbed the United
States of the high ground it desperately needs to maintain in order to
win. What better weapon for Al Qaeda than the news that an inmate at Guantánamo
was wrapped in the Israeli flag or that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were raped?
There is no escaping the fact that, whether he intended to or not, this
president handed Al Qaeda that weapon. Sometimes a brazen declaration
of toughness is actually a form of weakness. In a propaganda war for the
hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere, it's simply self-defeating.

And the damage done was intensified by President
Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president
who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure
would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response
to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to
say, ''Get off his back.'' In fact, those with real responsibility for
the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term,
while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin
Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal opinion maximizing
the kind of brutal treatment that the United States could legally defend,
Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded with a nomination to a federal
Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their
posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision
to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion,
is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney
general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to
be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing
he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly
be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us
who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give
an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing
that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single
simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions
that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction
of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge
when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each
of these questions is yes.

American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who made
the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh
- were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager
to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially
those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted
to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things
always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most
committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting
these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential
to winning this war.

I'm not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible
are as guilty as those who inflicted it.I am saying that when the results
are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and
war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this
respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were
guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned
in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ''heroic''
protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or
a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences
of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral
liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture
of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have
been right.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a
columnist at Time.